nevertheless, one can point and gesticulate and in so doing excite.  If I have done that I am content.  Twenty years hence, it is to be presumed, those who now read my writings will be saying of them what I was saying of M. Mauclair’s.  The prospect does not distress me.  I am not author enough to be pained by the certainty that in ten years’ time this book will be obsolete.  Like M. Mauclair’s, it will have served its turn; and I make no doubt there will be someone at hand to write another, the same in purpose, and in execution let us hope rather neater.

We all agree now—­by “we” I mean intelligent people under sixty—­that a work of art is like a rose.  A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else.  Neither is a work of art.  Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.  Unluckily, the matter does not end there:  a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.  In so far as we are mere spectators and connoisseurs we need not bother about these; all we are concerned with is the finished product, the work of art.  To produce the best eggs it may be that hens should be fed on hot meal mash.  That is a question for the farmer.  For us what matters is the quality of the eggs, since it is them and not hot meal mash that we propose to eat for breakfast.  Few, however, can take quite so lordly an attitude towards art.  We contemplate the object, we experience the appropriate emotion, and then we begin asking “Why?” and “How?” Personally, I am so conscious of these insistent questions that, at the risk of some misunderstanding, I habitually describe works of art as “significant” rather than “beautiful” forms.  For works of art, unlike roses, are the creations and expressions of conscious minds.  I beg that no theological red herring may here be drawn across the scent.

A work of art is an object beautiful, or significant, in itself, nowise dependent for its value on the outside world, capable by itself of provoking in us that emotion which we call aesthetic.  Agreed.  But men do not create such things unconsciously and without effort, as they breathe in their sleep.  On the contrary, for their production are required special energies and a peculiar state of mind.  A work of art, like a rose, is the result of a string of causes:  and some of us are so vain as to take more interest in the operations of the human mind than in fertilizers and watering-pots.

In the pre-natal history of a work of art I seem to detect at any rate three factors—­a state of peculiar and intense sensibility, the creative impulse, and the artistic problem.  An artist, I imagine, is one who often and easily is thrown into that state of acute and sympathetic agitation which most of us, once or twice in our lives, have had the happiness of experiencing.  And have you noticed that many men and most boys, when genuinely in love,